238 Why Your Anger is so Powerful - How to stop shrinking yourself to have a bigger impact on the world

Speaker A: 00:00:00

So I'm doing something a little bit different this week. A side of me that you may have seen glimmers of, but which I'm bringing out in full force today.

And I'm going to be talking all about how we as women can thrive in the world as it is today.

But even more than that, how each and every one of us can channel our anger, our frustration, our rage in ways that can make this world better, one person at a time. Because it feels like things have moved at lightning pace for the last few years.

We've seen so much change, so much corruption, let's face it, so many ways in which the rights of women, which have been fought so long and hard for, are being threatened right now. And it can feel really easy to be powerless in this situation.

But I believe with every part of me that when we all start to channel our rage, we can make the world a better place. Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to well Being, the podcast for women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host, Alix Life, therapeutic and fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out. Every week, I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the shoulds, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Hey, there.

Welcome back to this slightly different episode, but one which I hope you are going to love, because I don't know about you, but I have had a lot of stuff on my mind lately.

There is so much going on out in the world, so much chaos, so much negativity, and I just really felt the need to get this across in a podcast episode to talk about this a little bit, because I think that we are all feeling it right? We are all feeling this level of almost like confusion. How did we get here?

How are we in this place where all of these things are happening around us? We feel really powerless to do anything about them, and yet they're affecting our lives. They're affecting our lives every single day.

And for me, for sure, there's definitely that fear that our rights, particularly as women, are going to be rolled back at some point in certain ways that we may not find very welcome at all.

And so I wanted to talk about that because I think this has a real effect on us, on our nervous systems, on the way in which we relate to the world, we relate to ourselves, all those kind of things as well. But I think this episode is even just a little Bit more than that.

It's really just saying to each and every one of you that it may feel like you're powerless, but you are not. You know, we can still effect change one person at a time. We can stand there and we can say, actually, we are not going to stand by this anymore.

We're going to not allow this to happen. And it doesn't mean that we necessarily have to go out and protest on the streets and do all those kind of things.

But what it does mean is that we can look to making the world a better place in our own little corner of it. And every one of us that does that, that will have a ripple effect on everybody else around us.

And I think what's really been highlighted for me, and I think we knew this already, but I think the last couple of years especially have brought this into really sharp relief, is the world is still run by and for a very small group of powerful, rich, old white men. And they do not have our best, best interests at heart. They have their own interests at heart.

And I think for the vast majority, their interests do not align with ours. They do not align with the kind of lives that we want to be living. And if you have felt that, it can make you feel so many emotions.

I've gone through so many emotions.

There's anger and rage that the world has ended up this way that people can't see how damaging things that they are doing are to the world and to the people in this world. There's apathy, there's that level of. There's just nothing I can do about this. This just seems to be happening anyway.

There's frustration, all of those different things might be going on for you, and a mixture of lots of different things. Like I say, I've gone through all of these emotions and back again.

Because I think that depending on the day, depending on the new latest news story that' dropped or whatever, it can make us feel all sorts of different emotions. And I think whichever one of these we feel, it can also feel like our individual voices, they're just not enough.

It feels like no matter what we do, what we say, nothing ever seems to change. But what I want to bring you to today is to show you that change starts within each and every one of us.

Change starts within every single one of us who refuses to accept the status quo and who makes that change in her own little corner of the world and who knows that in her not accepting it, it's going to make the next person a bit braver to say, I don't accept this. And I think that the more of us that stand up and say we're not putting up with this shit, the greater chance we have of effecting change.

And, you know, I feel this so much in my little corner of the world particularly.

And you know what, what I do may not seem very big or huge, and it might seem very grand of me to say this, but everything that I do comes from a feminist agenda. And what I mean by that is that I see very clearly the way that the world has told us that our value comes from how we look and how thin we are.

But I've really recognized that what that does or what that is designed to do keeps us focused on our weight.

It keeps us hungry, it keeps us dissatisfied, it keeps us turning inwards and thinking that the problem is with us, this is exactly what they want because it keeps us quiet. And so I have this very clear eyed view that this is not our problem. This has been imposed on us from outside.

And the world does not seem to be getting any quieter on this particular subject. It seems to be getting louder, if anything.

And so it's very easy in the world as it is to feel badly about ourselves, to feel down about ourselves, to feel down about the way we look and all of those things, and to end up with that focus on ourselves. Because when we're focusing on ourselves, we're not focusing on the stuff outside of us.

We're not looking at what the world is trying to tell us we need to be. So there's that. There's this idea that our value comes from how hard we work, from how many sacrifices we make for others.

And this particularly is the case for women, that we are expected to sacrifice our own needs for everybody else's, whether it's a partner, whether it's children, whether it's the community that's around us. We are expected to sit back and let everybody else take precedence over us and over our own needs. And again, of course, I disagree with that.

I don't think that that is the way that the world should work. Sure, we can care for other people, sure we can hold compassion for other people, sure we can do things for other people.

But when it always comes at the expense of ourselves, it's not a healthy way to live. It's not a healthy way for society to function in that sacrifice that we make for others all the time.

There's also the fact that so much of our value comes in how productive we are. You know, only this week, a certain party, a certain political party you're going to know who I mean.

I'm not going to name them, but they've basically come out saying that people who work at home are less productive when we actually know. Number one, that's not true. There's plenty of evidence to show that that is not true.

And number two, working from home is one of the lifelines for women, more than men, that allows them to work and to care for kids and to do all of the other things that need doing in life. And it does not mean we are less productive. It means we are more able to be a part of the working world. We are more able to be part of the world.

And I think that there's a real danger here that that will be seen as less than that. That will be seen as you're being lazy, that will be seen as you are not as committed. We don't need that.

We don't need that in our lives, especially as women. We need that flexibility. It's really, really important to us. They know exactly what they're doing here.

Make it harder for women to work so they're more likely to stay at home and just keep producing more kids. Right. You know, keep us quiet. Again, keep us quiet.

I think that all of these things together, and I'm sure there are others as well, there's other things in society or beliefs in society that are that they're designed to keep us small, they're designed to keep us quiet, they're designed to keep us in our place because they keep us focused on our productivity, on how much we can do, on how hard we can work, on how many sacrifices we can make for others, on how small we can make ourselves. And it's taking all of our energy away from the stuff that is actually flipping important.

And so when I do the work that I do, one of the reasons that I have recently rebranded and started to create some new programs and things and new offers for my clients is that I see it as my job to show you that none of this is true, to show you that we all have value without those things.

And that so much of the pressure that we think we are putting on ourselves, so much of the pressure that we think is inevitable is actually coming from outside of us.

And so the more women I can help to move beyond that, the more women I can help to see that innate brilliance, their innate worth, the more women are going to go out into the world and lead by example. They're not going to be constantly swayed by the latest fad. They're not going to be constantly thinking about their weight.

They're not going to be constantly thinking about whether they should be eating that piece of cake or not. And whether that's a bad thing to do or a good thing to do is we need to be able to see and understand and feel that we have a deeper level of worth.

And I'm not saying you can't change. You know, I've just got braces, I want a nice straight smile. We can all want those things.

But I think the difference is that society is kind of determined to define us by those things. To define us by our dress size, to define us by our productivity, define us by how hard we work.

Now those things may be important to us, but they're not the things that define us. They are not the things that make us who we are. They are not the things that make us worthy.

I want every one of you to see your innate worth, to understand that those things are nice, but they are window dressing. We get to be worthy exactly as we are. We get to be powerful exactly as we are. We get to say things the way they are, exactly as we are.

We don't have to earn that. We certainly don't have to earn it by the way that we look or how productive we might be. We are allowed to say that.

And I think the more that women understand that, the more change that we make in the world.

I do not want women shrinking themselves because they're thinking about food and their weight constantly or beating themselves up over that missed workout.

I want women who have full confidence in themselves at any time, regardless of where they are in their fitness, their well being, their health journey, whatever that might look like. I want women to get to choose what life looks like for them.

Because the more of us that do this, the more of us that reject what we are told to do, the more powerful that we become. And it doesn't mean giving up on ourselves. It doesn't mean we're not allowed to change.

It's just knowing, like I said before, that that stuff, it's okay, but it's window dressing. It's not the essence of who we are. It's not the thing that should determine our self worth. It's not the thing that we should be judging ourselves by.

Because when I look around me and when I see where a world concerned with the external, with productivity, with constantly proving ourselves has got us, then I'm beginning to think that it's not the be all and the end all. And if there is anyone in this world that can take us To a place of deeper compassion and deeper understanding and a deeper level of humanity.

It's women. It's women. That's not to say no men involved.

But let's face it, it's been, as I said at the start, old, rich white men who have been in charge for way too fricking long. And it is our turn to stand up and to show that we can coexist with more compassion.

We can coexist with deeper understanding for ourselves and for others. We can coexist with a deeper level of humanity.

And that makes everything better for us, for the next generation, for our kids, for all of those things. So you know what I do?

It might seem to be about just helping you to feel good in your own skin or break free from diets, for example, but the way I see it, it's much bigger than that. I'm here to instill in every woman that comes into my world a deeper sense of compassion for herself, a deep sense of self worth.

Because the more women who have that, the less they are held back. The more the world changes, the more we are standing up for themselves and saying, you don't decide anymore, we do.

And I might not have a massive audience, but I do have an audience, and I take that very, very seriously.

So the way that I look at it is that every one of us has our own area that we get to do that, that we get to have a say, have an influence over the world as it is.

You know, I'm channeling my rage every day into the work that I do, every podcast episode where I speak to the things that might be holding you back right now, every post I put out there that shows you that always worrying about what you're gonna eat next isn't the way that things have to be for you. In every email I send out, I'm channeling my rage. And I am channeling it because I want to see the world be a better place.

And I believe that we do that through women. I believe that we do that through women who believe in themselves, who believe in their worth. That's what I believe.

And the thing is that the existing systems that we live within, they shape every single one of us. They're shaping our self trust, they're shaping our confidence.

They're shaping the way that we set boundaries and the way that we minimize our own needs because we think that everybody else's needs are more important. They shape our relationship with our body, our relationship with ourselves.

They make us feel like we are the problem, and it makes us Feel jaded and tired because we're always in this perpetual loop of always trying to do better, always trying to stay busy, always trying to look after everybody else, making sure we don't speak up too much, because if we do, we're aggressive or whatever that might be, and we keep ourselves in this place where so much of the load is on us and it's not our fault. This is what society has conditioned us to be.

But I think if we let anything good come out of what is going on in the world right now, it's that we stand up and we say, actually, I am not doing that anymore. I don't allow that anymore. I don't accept that that is the way that things have to be anymore.

And so I am going to allow myself to start breaking out of this loop so that instead of being the proverbial frog in water, you know, you put the frog in cold water and then it gradually heats up to the point that we don't notice it until it's too late. Instead, with a frog that goes straight into the boiling water and jumps straight out again and goes, not today. I'm not having this.

We have an opportunity right now to see all of this that is going on around us for what it is, bullshit. And we take the rage we feel about it and we channel it. And what we channel it into is refusing to shrink ourselves for others all the time.

If when you do that, do it for your bloody self, stop telling yourself, oh, it's just for me, it's not. We're doing it because we've been told that that is what makes us wor. But we're allowed to stop doing that if we want to.

We channel it into setting healthy boundaries that respect our own time, our own needs. Uncomfortable as it might be, sometimes we have to do that. We have to stop being in service to everybody else all of the time.

There is nothing wrong with looking after other people. There is nothing wrong with being caring. But when we constantly do it at the expense of our own needs, that's where it needs to change.

That's where we need to look at those healthy boundaries. We channel it into resting, not because we've earned it, but because it is our right to do so.

We do not have to be productive every minute of the day. We do not have to make every activity we do be productive every minute of the day. Sometimes we're allowed to just rest.

That in itself is channeling our rage. We get to channel it into judging ourselves not on how busy we are and how Much pressure we can handle and how much we can produce.

But by knowing that we are enough, exactly as we are, we need to stop judging ourselves so harshly all the time. The world is already doing that for us. We don't need to add to it.

And we are allowed to say, actually, I don't accept anymore that those are the measures by which I measure my worth.

And we can channel it into reconnecting with ourselves instead of letting the world tell us all the time who we should be and what we should be doing, but actually learning to listen to our gut instinct. Because honestly, when we start to do this, we become a force. The more of us that do that, the more we start to change everything.

We change families, we change workplaces, we change communities. And we make the world better for us now and we make it better for the generation that is coming after us.

Because I don't know about you, but I sure as hell do not want my kids living in the world as is now. I want them living in a world that is better than the one that the old white rich men have in mind for us right now.

And the world is going to become a better place when women are fully themselves, when they trust themselves, when they believe in themselves. That stuff is going to shine for everybody to see.

And I'm not saying this is easy, but what I am saying is that when you are actually willing to look at this, when you are willing to say, I don't accept this anymore, when you start to set healthier boundaries, when you start to allow yourself to rest more, when you stop beating yourself up about your weight all the time, it has a ripple effect on everybody else around you. It's like they say, isn't it? It's not what you say, it's what you do that counts. And this is more true than anything. It's like with your kids.

You can tell your kids certain things till you're blue in the face, but they're not going to listen. But they are going to look at your example, they are going to follow your example.

They are going to look at the way that you relate to yourself and they're going to realize that it's normal to do that.

So, yeah, it's not easy to do this, but if you can start doing a few of those things around boundaries, around, rest around, just stop flipping while beating yourself up about everything all the time, then just think how much more powerful you would be, how much more powerful we would all be in this world as it is. So, look, stuff is hard at the moment. It's stupid, it's exhausting.

We are veering from one crisis to another, but we get to choose our reaction to that. We can stay apathetic, we can decide there's nothing we can do to change things, or we can take matters into our own hands.

We can actually become the change that we want to see. And I know which one I've chosen and which one I will continue to strive towards personally and in my work as well.

Maybe if you have been feeling a bit apathetic, it is time for you to choose too.

Because I honestly believe that the more of us as women take the power into our own hands, the more of us who believe in ourselves, the more of us who are willing to accept ourselves exactly as they are, but are not willing to accept the status quo, the better we get. Right. Anyway, time to put my soapbox away and get on with channeling a bit more rage. So I hope it's given you a bit of food for thought.

Like I say, it was a bit of a change of pace today. It was definitely something a little bit different, but it was something that I just. Do you know what? I just felt like I needed to say.

I'm absorbing so much of what is going on around us and I don't really read the news or anything like that anymore. I don't watch the news because I think it's all a load of biased crap half the time.

But of course I still do absorb stuff through social media and all sorts of things. So it's definitely has been sitting heavy on me, but also has given me that kick up the backside to say, actually I don't have to accept this.

I don't have to accept that I have no power. I may feel powerless.

I may feel like when I go out and vote it doesn't really make any difference and we just get, you know, the same stuff recycled, the same old politicians coming back time and time again. It does feel like that sometimes. But that's the thing. If we sit around waiting for them to change, it's going to be a really long time.

It's going to be a very, very slow bur. And I do believe that there are good people out there.

I do believe that there are people who have our best interests at heart and do want to see change and do want to make things better. I do strongly believe that. But I also believe that we cannot leave it to chance. I believe we cannot leave it to other people to decide our fate.

We get to choose that for ourselves. And much as I will still have days when I just feel angry or I feel despondent. The important thing is that I am going to channel what I'm feeling.

I'm going to channel my rage into the appropriate places. I'm going to channel it into my business. Particularly that, for me, is the place that I get to do that. But where's your place?

Where's the place that you get to channel that? Is it literally just in how you live every day? Is it how you set an example for your kids? Is it how you set an example for your friends?

Do you get to be the one who meets up with their friends? And you're the first one that thinks, do you know what?

Instead of sitting here and joining in on the old pile on we do on ourselves every time about how fat we feel and how we need to lose weight, that I'm going to say, actually, I'm not doing that this time. I'm not joining in with that conversation this time. It could literally be as simple as that.

Because when other women see you doing it and saying, actually, I don't want a part of this conversation anymore. I want a more positive conversation, then maybe it will give them pause.

Maybe they will take a second ago, oh, actually, maybe I'm being really mean about myself. Maybe I should be a bit kinder to myself.

And that kindness, that compassion we show for ourselves is then going to bleed into everywhere else and everybody around us. And I think the more of us that do that, the more that we can change things for the better. We can create the kind of society that we want to see.

So, anyway, back to slightly more normal programming next week, I promise you. But for now, I'm going to love you and leave you, and I'll see you back here again next time. Thank you, as always, for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it. And come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.